“The global economic downturn and the euro-zone crisis may stand in the way of efforts to reduce poverty and disease around the world,” Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said on Wednesday in a talk at the London School of Economics sponsored by the Global Poverty Project, Bloomberg reports. Gates noted that “‘incredible progress’ had been made toward reducing poverty and disease,” and said, “There are many things going on in terms of the euro-zone crisis, budget cutbacks, that would make it easy to turn inward and actually reduce the financing that has led to so much progress,” according to the news service.